This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

It is widely expected that Apple will refresh its iPhone line-up later this year with the introduction of the iPhone 5S. We aren’t expecting much of a change between the iPhone 5 and 5S in terms of how it looks. That’s based on the fact Apple doesn’t seem to be investing much at the moment in new production equipment, meaning not much in the way of new hardware features. With that being the case, Apple will be focused on upgrading the components inside the handset.

The image you see above is thought to be a leaked shot of the motherboard that will ship inside the iPhone 5S. As usual, this has come from an unknown source that website iOSDoc trusts along with a few details of what we can expect with the refresh in terms of software updates.

Apparently, that A7 processor you see in the image is a quad-core chip that will be clocked at 1.2GHz. Although the A6 inside the iPhone 5 runs slightly faster at 1.3GHz, it’s only a dual-core chip so the A7 should offer noticeable performance gains and allow the smartphone to just do more. The GPU is expected to be switched out for the quad-core PowerVR SGX554MP4, which is used in the 4th-gen iPad. There’s also expected to be 2GB of dual-channel LPDDR2-1066 RAM on board instead of the 1GB the iPhone 5 currently uses. Again, that should allow more headroom for the software and apps you want to run on the phone.

With new hardware also comes some software updates and usually a few surprises from Apple. The introduction of the iPhone 5S is expected to include iOS 7 rolled out alongside an updated version of Siri.

All that new hardware means there’s bound to be significantly more draw on the battery. Apple will have to counter that either with a more aggressive battery management system, or by managing to squeeze a larger battery inside the case.